Extract

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7.  Life-cycle service

‘Wanton children, of toiling the land capable, their parents desert, so as to accommodate themselves and serve at someone else’s household, thus acting to the detriment both of their parents and themselves as well’ [comment from the Book of Law of the Puck Starosty]1

‘Наняўся, як прадаўся’ (Hiring yourself, you are selling yourself) [Belarusian proverb]2

7.1  Introduction

Given the importance of service as a crucial destination stage of home-leavers, as was shown in the preceding analysis, this subject should be further explored, even if the phenomenon itself seems to have been largely confined to the Western part of the CEURFAMFORM collection. For decades, scholars have argued that the European Marriage Pattern and its associated features might have been conducive to early industrialisation and economic growth (Hajnal 1965; Laslett 1983). Recent contributions have stressed the importance of the mechanisms underlying the marriage pattern and the expansion of an extensive wage-labour market to the development of the capitalist economy (Hartman 2004; De Moor and Van Zanden 2010a). In particular, the widespread employment of young, unmarried people as live-in servants in pre-industrial Europe was described as critically important in attempts to link familial features with patterns of accumulation of savings and human capital formation (for criticism, see Dennison 2011b; Saito 2011). Servants were also seen as harbingers of change ← 319 | 320 → with respect to other spheres, including social and sexual life (Bras 2004; Fauve-Chamoux 2004; Matthys 2011).